Movie Review: Frank

The head and the heart.

At first glance, Frank seems like twee hipster bait. It’s about a struggling songwriter. Tweets flash onscreen like in a millennial episode of Pop-Up Video.
It treats Austin—and specifically South by Southwest—like El Dorado. A
pixie-haired Maggie Gyllenhaal plays synth. Oh, and its star spends the
entire film wearing a gigantic fiberglass head modeled after an early
Max Fleischer cartoon character, complete with saucer eyes.

The great Michael
Fassbender plays Frank, a character inspired by the stage persona of
musician Chris Sievey, who donned a similar head when performing as
Frank Sidebottom. (Jon Ronsom, who wrote the screenplay with Peter
Straughan, played in Sievey’s band.) We’re first introduced to Frank
onstage, when dweeby hack Jon (Domhnall Gleeson) is enlisted to play
keys for Frank’s band, Soronprfbs. Amid a cacophony of noise-pop hooks,
Frank flails around with the vigor of David Byrne being tased, spouting
nonsense lyrics—“fiddly digits, itchy britches, I love you all”—to an
empty room.

Captivated,
Jon agrees to join the band as it records its masterpiece. Whisked away
to a rustic Irish cabin, he’s initially puzzled by the cult of
personality surrounding Frank. He also draws the ire of Clara
(Gyllenhaal), whose overprotectiveness of Frank borders on sociopathic.
But Jon eventually becomes enamored with Frank, and he secretly posts
their rehearsal footage online, which takes them to SXSW—and to a series
of meltdowns.

Fassbender has become one of his generation’s best actors. He can play a supervillain in X-Men and a racist monster in 12 Years a Slave, and he can show vulnerability (Shame) and charm (Inglorious Basterds).
Here, forced to hide his striking smile, he conveys Frank’s alluring
charisma, artistic genius and openheartedness through his body language.
His nervous tics and erratic movements gain gravity when it’s revealed
Frank was recently institutionalized for unnamed reasons. When paired
with his droll surfer voice—which, when singing, evokes a cross between
late Morphine frontman Mark Sandman and the National’s Matt
Berninger—it’s both goofy and startling.

But Frank is
much more than a movie in which Michael Fassbender dons an oversized
helmet. It’s about the lust for artistic recognition and the toll of
sudden fame. It’s heavier than a comedy about a gibberish-spewing guy in
a giant head ought to be, but that’s what makes it a thing of
heartbreaking, oddball beauty.